• Download the Sierra Leone section of Home Truths: A Global Report on Equality in the Muslim Family in English or Arabic. 

• View the report submitted to Musawah by the Sierra Leone Muslim Missionaries Women’s Group.

Sierra Leone’s population is estimated to be 60 to 65 per cent Muslim and 20 to 30 per cent Christian, with the remaining 5 to 10 per cent practising indigenous and other religious beliefs. Freedom of religion is provided for in the 1991 Constitution, which also accommodates religious laws and policies in several areas, including family law. General statutory law, English common law and customary law, which includes Islamic law, operate together. For Muslims, matters relating to marriage and divorce are regulated in part by the Mohammedan Marriage Ordinance of 1905. The country is still recovering from the devastating ten-year conflict that ended in 2001, in which women were particularly affected by loss of family members, displacement, widespread sexual violence and the responsibility of caring for their families.

• In Sierra Leone, social and cultural life, especially in the rural areas, is dominated by outdated values in which women are considered to be inferior to men. In the Northern Province, where women suffer the most marginalisation, they are denied status, public roles and positions in society.
   
• In the domestic sphere, women are generally voiceless. Their husbands or fathers hold all of the decision-making power for the family. Whatever the husband says is final, despite the Qur’anic command of mutual consultation between women and men. It is taboo for women to state their opinions in family gatherings, let alone to counter anything that had been previously suggested by a male counterpart.
   
• Women and girls suffer discrimination and abuse in a number of areas, including:
  • Domestic violence against women is common and is generally accepted in society. A UNICEF study showed that 85 percent of women felt that domestic beating was justified for actions such as going out without telling their husbands, neglecting the children, arguing with their husbands, refusing sex, or burning food. Few women report domestic violence to authorities, the police generally do not intervene even if the violence is reported, and perpetrators are seldom charged and even less seldom convicted of a crime.
  • Early marriage and forced marriage are common for girls under the age of 18.
  • Female genital mutilation is widely practised and is supported by community members.
  • Women are discriminated against in inheritance provisions and orphan girls are not granted inheritance from their deceased fathers
  • Widows are often ill-treated by their former husbands’ families.

• Amendments to the Code of Muslim Personal Laws (CMPL) were drafted by Muslim women and submitted to the Lower House of Congress in 2000, though the endeavour was not successful. The proposed amendments included the requirement of pre-marriage counselling to emphasise the rights of women and the obligations of husbands; ante-nuptial agreements that can include an option for monogamy; and an increase in the minimum age of marriage to 18 years.
   
• A subset of these Muslim women are now formulating arguments using different disciplines and approaches—religious, rights-based, scientific, and even evidence-based researches on topics such as early marriage. In addition, awareness raising and capacity building are taking place to build a stronger and bigger constituency to push for the amendments.
   
• In the 2006 Concluding Comments of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, Muslim women were identified as a subsegment of women who need intensified initiatives, including in the area of Muslim family laws.
   
• Some cultural practices are more progressive than the standards laid down by the CMPL. For example, while the Code provides for sisters getting half of what their brothers acquire in the inheritance, the actual practice has been to give equal shares to all the siblings, regardless of sex, or to circumvent the provision by giving ante-mortem gifts to the daughters.
   
• Women can rely on laws that apply to all of the citizens of the Philippines, such as the Anti-Violence against Women and Children Law. The CMPL is limited in its view of domestic violence; the national law’s inclusion of economic and psychological violence therefore provides remedies.

Sierra Leone first reported to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women in 2007 in a combined first, second, third, fourth and fifth periodic report. In its Concluding Comments, the Committee congratulated the Government on the three new bills relating to women that were then pending before Parliament (registration of customary marriages and divorce, intestate succession and domestic violence), but expressed concern about:

• 'the high levels of violence against women, including rape and sexual assault';
• the persistence of customary law and cultural practices that consider the physical chastisement of family members, in particular women, acceptable';
• 'that discriminatory provisions persist in customary law and the Mohammedan Marriage Act'; and
• 'that local courts, which apply customary law, are not part of the judicial system and consequently their decisions are not subject to appeal'.